Unlike most days when he complains of having lain awake all night (despite prolonged periods of snoring), Dad reported he had slept like a baby in “the longest sleep of my life,” his birthday slumber.  We did not schedule a CNA for in-home care for Christmas Eve, giving Nick the day off instead.  We like Nick.  He told Dad he has a felony conviction from his younger days (he’s only 25).  And we liked him the more for his industry and cheer and for making a new life for him and his wife.  So, despite Dad’s protestation that “I don’t think I will shower today,” the privilege was mine to help him shower and dry and dress and have breakfast (leftover rice transformed into rice pudding with cardamom and vanilla and raisins and milk) and get settled in his recliner with Sunday’s New York Times.  He talked incessantly as he showered, asking occasionally from inside the glassed stall, “Are you there, Rog?” and as I chopped vegetables for Sunday’s crock pot chicken.  He told me, again, about spending day after day at Sandy’s house decades, tearing out overgrown shrubs and relandscaping, painting the house inside and out, jacking up the tilting front steps to pour concrete underneath.  “I was full of energy and strength in those days,” he remembered, the days when he was also the bishop (lay minister) of our church.  “I also think I was a little crazy.”  Okay, this is new, I thought.  “Why do you say that,” I asked, more than curious.  “Because,” he answered, “every day I spent working at her house was a day I did not spend at my house.”  And with your family, I wanted him to say.  Dad was God’s gift to New Jersey, the entire congregation felt.  And he was.  He was full of generous service.  I have lived much of my life blinded and exhausted by the light and force of his being, feeling my own a dull weakness in comparison.  But I cooked for the family who gathered for our Christmas Eve party, where he recounted a story from 1967, when he was gathered with his little family on Christmas Eve, and suddenly his world went dark, and he could see nothing, but he could hear the Voice, the voice that said to him, I am going to show you.  I want you to see her the way I see her.  And in his mind he could see in the blackness a little dark house, with no lights on, and a little old woman sitting crushingly alone and sad in her dark room.  Emerging from this vision, Dad bundled Mom and me (3) and Megan (1) into the car and drove us from East Brunswick to Edison, where we knocked and knocked on the door of the cottage with no lights on until a little old woman came to the door and let us in.  We turned on some lights, pulled out boxes of Christmas decorations from storage, set up and decorated her tree, and talked and sang hymns and carols, and gladdened her sad heart.  I was too young to remember, but Dad’s story is memory enough.  And he said to us, “This might be my last Christmas with you.  Who knows?  But I want you to hear, from me, that I love the Savior, and I know his voice.”